- Over at Slashdot, there’s a thread asking How Do You Get Work Done? Some days the answer is,
I don’t.
But it’s a problem I struggle with on a regular basis. My solutions are lists (and after things have sat on the list forever and just aren’t getting done, I scratch ’em out and try and forget about them–if it’s imporant, it’ll get added to a list again soon enough) and breaking big tasks up into smaller chunks so I can time-slice more efficiently and actually get cracking on the bigger projects without worrying about how much work is in front of me. How’s it working? Let’s just say there are still some bugs to be ironed out. - Interested on one guy’s take on the Democratic candidates for president? Go check out ninedwarfs.com. [instapundit]
- Model-Rocket Bill Stirs Debate. Seems the Democrats (led by by good old Chuck Schumer in collusion with the Justice Department) have decided that model rockets and black powder are too dangerous for us masses to have on hand. The Republicans want to let us play rockets. Well, if you can’t get your hands on any black powder, get yourself some sulfur, a little charcoal, and some bat or bird guano. Nitrates are easy to extract with just plain ol’ water. Mix ’em up and you’ve got black powder.
- In Fanmail from flounderers, Den Beste looks further at why we had to attack Iraq, and why the anti-war movement had as little effect on the policy debate as they did:
Well, let’s try a little thought experiment. Let’s schedule a debate, and invite a lot of voters. The first speaker stands up and makes a case for one position, laying out his explanation of why the problem happened, and then saying what he thinks needs to be done to solve it, and explaining why he thinks it will help. Then he sits down.
His opponent, on the left side of the stage, stands up, grins at the audience, and pulls his pants down and moons the first speaker. He then returns his pants to their customary position and returns to his seat. End of debate.
If the audience was not partisan ahead of time, which advocate is more likely to have convinced them?
- There’s Diverging Estimates of the Costs of Spam, but people are saying billions per year, both for processing the spam, and also for time wasted trying to get legitimate mail past overzealous filters.
- Trade Practices Act Is Basis for Australian Complaint Against SCO
Open Source Victoria has filed a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission against SCO. The tactic of using unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats to extract money from millions of Linux users may well be illegal in many countries, including Australia.
- Hey, at the rate they’re going, the RIAA will take 2191.78 years to sue everyone.
- RedPaper lets you sell writing on the web for anything from 2 cents up to whatever you think you can charge for it. There’s a wired article that explains it more, but it’s backed by Adobe and RedPaper gets 5 ¼ percent of the take, which means you get to keep a pretty decent percentage.
- You probably remember Hudson Hawk. It’s an improbable story of a cat-burglar who times his breakins by singing tunes, and how he’s working with a secret vatican agent nun. But dangit, it’s a fun movie, if you accept the premise and just lean back and enjoy it. 9 of 10.
- Matt Damon does a nice job of playing a super-spy with amnesia in The Bourne Identity. Franka Potente does a great job as the gal who’s helping him find out who he is. 8 of 10. From the sound of things, they’re planning to do movies from the other two books in the trilogy eventually, but don’t hold your breath—The Bourne Supremacy is slated for 2005.
- Phone Booth stars Colin Farrell as an self-absorbed publicist who’s trapped in a phone booth by a sniper. It’s a story that Hitchcock reportedly wanted to do, but couldn’t figure out a good reason for someone to be trapped in a phone booth. I guess I’d give it a 7 of 10, but maybe an 8. Not much in the way of action, per se, but still plenty going on. It’s only 81 minutes long, but seemed longer, in a good way.
- True Crime is a story about a man convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, who’s to be executed that night. Clint Eastwood plays the (formerly drunk) reporter who’s trying to prove they’ve got the wrong guy. 7 of 10, only because it’s a little more predicable than I’d like.
- Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson are back as Roy O’Bannon and Chon Wang in Shanghai Knights. Yeah, it’s a sequel, but it’s a reasonable story and it’s a Jackie Chan movie, so I have to like it. If you liked the first one, you’ll enjoy this one, too. 8 of 10.
- The Toxic Avenger’s certainly not a good movie, but it’s actually paced pretty well, and there’s enough T & A so even when it gets slow, there’s something to watch. Add in some gratuitous gore, and you’ve got a fine movie for sitting around and drinking beer while you watch it. Probably only a 4 or 5 of 10, unless you’re loaded.
- The Farrelly Brothers do the Three Stooges. And I mean that in the
rape
sense ofdo
. Bleagh. [steveo] - Skeptic abandons the faithful Many science-oriented skeptic groups will attempt to accommodate the faith of religion whilst rejecting the faith of pseudoscience. This has included heavyweight skeptic James Randi and his organization, who heretofore has said that religious belief is qualitatively different from belief in ghosts or alien visitations. You could proudly call yourself both Christian and a skeptic with the full endorsement of Randi. That is, until this week. Randi is absolutely fed up. If one is looking to reconcile science and religion, assuming that one thinks that such is needed, Randi is now the wrong guy to assist. [reed]
- Cory deconstructs a hysterical Washington Post WiFi FUD article. If he’s not careful, he’ll start being a
security expert
. Heh. [boing boing] - Meanwhile, in Waiting For The Punchline, Evan deconstructs another Washington Post article about how companies make money making us fatter, and how
something must be done
. [101-280] - Y’know, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who have skills and are unemployed. Neither does the author of Technical Employment For All! He has a pretty good idea of a way to find work for unemployed geeks. If you’re out of work and interested in doing something, go read the article. [papa scott]
- When you do start your own business, take a look at this essay on client relationships. It’s just good business. [zeldman]
- Dave Winer’s got a review of Moneyball and in Where the Money Is, Cosh talks about Moneyball ISBN:0393057658 and how it relates to some triple-A ballplayers he recently interviewed in Edmonton. Interesting. [colby cosh]
- ESPN’sThe List: Baseball’s one-hit wonders. Yep, that’s a pretty good list.
- Once a revered ritual, pepper becomes passe as players spend more time in batting cages and groundskeepers need to keep the grass behind home plate looking nicer for TV. [fark!]
- Seeking Hussein and His Successor: History in a War Zone—it’s a tricky thing trying to write history as it’s happening, and a few recent documentaries are showing just how tricky it can be.
- Can the car the Rick and Bryan built get traction? It’s a battery-powered electic two-seater that does 0-60 in 4 seconds, and has a top-speed of 130mph with a range of 80mph. You can order one for $80,000, or wait for them to find a major manufacturer and hopefully sell ’em for $20,000.
- Lloyd Larish has had A Lifetime of Keeping Big Clocks Ticking. He repairs tower clocks, and is one of the few people in the country who knows how to do it.
- As Clock Ticks for Hubble, Some Plead for a Reprieve. The Space Telescope was due to be decommissioned in 2010, but as good as Hubble has proven to be, people are now thinking that maybe its life should be extended.
- Did the Dome’s air flow turn pop flies into home runs? Retired Metrodome superintendent says he did his best to affect Twins games, and one of two independent tests showed that a fly ball flew 3½′ farther when the fans were turned on behind home plate.
- Ron Paul says
I’ll probably win this argument
when talking about cutting the size of government. The reason he’s optimistic?
Here’s hoping he’s right. [endwar]The reason is not because anybody’s going to pay any attention to what I say. But what’s going to happen is we’re going to run out of money. It happens to every empire, throughout all history.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a website where anyone can check to see if they’re wanted by the RIAA for filesharing. Punch in the username you use when sharing and it compares it to a database of names mentioned in subpoenas filed in D.C. court. [jim]
- Gary Kremen prevails in sex.com lawsuit. It’s been ruled that he can sue Verisign because Network Solutions (which Verisign acquired) gave away the sex.com domain name. [boing boing]
- Looking for a good domain name? Go check out splorp’s available domain name of the week. Many good ones are still available (or if you have a good idea for what to do with mentalhygienist.com you could probably talk me into giving you that one).
- Bruce Krafft wrote My Day at the Mall, about how he was detained at the Mall of America for legally carrying firearms. [endwar]
- Joe Adams: terrorist? Cottage Grove man stuck on no-fly list that the TSA admitted exists just a month ago. Martin Sabo is trying to attach an amendment to the funding bill for the revamped TSA so their new list won’t be funded until a study has been done on its effects on civil liberties, but after Congressman Sabo voted for USA-PATRIOT in 2001, I don’t have very high expectations. He strikes me (as Paul Wellstone did) as someone who says
I’m from the government and I’m here to help
and means it. Spooky. - Old St. Paul power plant might get spark of redevelopment. The power plant is the one I took a picture of back in November of 2001 and wasn’t sure what it was at the time. It is an interesting building and redevelopment there would be cool, but it doesn’t seem right to kick out the funky houseboats, either.
- I went looking through my logs the other day. The most popular google search was for grilled trout, followed by the golden gate bridge, then rhubarb sauce, and raspberry sorbet. It gets a lot less interesting after that.
- The Friends of Tim Pawlenty seem to have engaged in some shady business dealings with the governor’s help. That doesn’t seem right.
- Why does the Governor’s connection with the telecom company matter? Well, there may be more hidden behind the Secrets and lies. There’s pretty obviously a bunch of money that went to Tim Pawlenty, for services rendered, but it’s hard to know what those services were. It sure was convenient for shady long-distance resellers to have a legislator and now governor working for them, though.
- What Hearings? What Scandal? Well, there may be some hearings, and it’s possible that Minnesota law covering financial disclosure by candidates will change, as will the law regarding what kind of outside work legislators can take.
- Politicians’ telecoms wronged consumers, violating consumer protection laws. Tim Pawlenty owned a slice. There’s only two real issues in these stories, but it doesn’t look good when two of the local newspapers are doing takedown pieces on the Governor. Even Jesse didn’t get this much bad press all at once.
- Last night was pretty exciting Friday night for me. Based on some recommendations, I set my TiVo to capture some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy last week (did you know TiVo has a “Gay and Lesbian” category?), and I spent last night sitting at home, doing laundry, drinking beer, and laughing at the queers. It’s not so much that I’m looking for fashion tips (I could probably use some, but I’m not looking at the moment) as that it was fun to watch the guys tsking over the appalling taste some straight guys have. Recommended entertainment, but maybe the beer helped.
- Finally, don’t stare at this picture for too long, or your head may explode. You have been warned. [holy schmoly]
- Swiss researchers have found a method for Cracking Windows passwords in seconds as long as the passwords are alphanumeric. If you’re using Windows, perhaps it’s time to sneak some punctuation into your passwords.
- Then again, if you’re running Windows, weak passwords are probably the least of your worries: Critical flaw found in Windows, specifically in DirectX. A carefully crafted MIDI file on a web-page can open your computer to all kinds of nastiness. Is this when I mention that maybe you should get a Mac?
- Freeviewing Stereoscopic photos have existed nearly since the beginnings of photography in the 19th century. Surprisingly, you can view these images without special equipment by freeviewing. Remember to tilt your head! Some images to get you started: Donner Lake and dock workers. Many more exist, find them via Googling. [reed] [I dunno, Reed. Trying to freeview just gives me a headache, but I can’t do the random dot ones, either. -DaveP]
- Finally, Good news from the health industry. According to Italian researches (who are certainly unbiased) eating pizza cuts cancer risk.
Does this mean I just didn’t eat enough pizza? [jim] [Yes, Jim, that must be it. -DaveP] - Gun shop suing to stay in Minneapolis Mark Koscielski is suing to be allowed to find some place in Minneapolis to run his gun shop. Current zoning means he’d have to move out of town.
- In Doc’s The Fifth Horse (of the apocalypse), he talks about the FCC deregulation allowing Clear Channel to buy all the radio/TV stations in a town that the House is trying to block. The problem is that the FCC has never deregulated the airwaves, so there’s a monopoly power there, and the only way to fight that is to further regulate the market. Regulation breeds the need for more regulation. Blegh. [doc]
- The ActiveState Field Guide to Spam describes the tricks spammers are using to avoid filters and sneak their spam through to your email.
- The challenge of global employees mostly boils down to communication. But that can be tricky even when you’re working in the same office. And something that the article doesn’t mention is the tax headaches. I’ve got an employee in Wisconsin, about 40 miles from here. I’m currently fighting with my payroll service and the Wisconsin Department of Revenue over state income tax withholding, and that’s after I spent a couple days trying to get everything set up correctly back in March. It may be sorted out, but I’m still waiting to hear how much of penalty I’m going to owe. Ugh.
- ‘Flash Mob’ Mentality Arrives and not surprisingly, it confuses people. Show up, strike a pose, hit the road is the Strib’s somewhat calmer take.
- Digging for Googleholes - Google may be our new god, but it’s not omnipotent. In fact, it’s skewed just the way the rest of the web is, towards things geeks maqkke web-pages about.
- Interested in working on a content management system? Or just running a different one? Dan’s making the Flutterby CMS available. [flutterby]
- Rearranging an Ad Jingle So That It Now Jangles. Free Speech for Sale is selling CDs with sampled and rearranged commercial jingles. Or you can download the tracks and cover art from their website if you can get through.
- During lunch today, I wrote about the Dog Days of summer. Arf!
- Home on the Go with NetInfo describes part of the magic needed to put you Mac OS X home directory on a removable device. Automounting Sharepoints at Startup has some more of the magic using nfs, but only tells how to do it with no authentication (which seems a bit dangerous), plus nfs isn’t exactly known for its security. Mac OS X Local User Account & Network Login Account gets closer, but where the heck is the Apple documentation that will tell me how to do this easily? Readers? Anyone have an idea? If you know of a link, please send it in and I’ll tell everyone how cool you are. I don’t especially want to have to figure this out myself and write it up.
- Security Spy looks like just the software to turn an iSight and a spare Mac into a home security system. I think I may have found a use for that iBook I was thinking about selling after all. Now I just need to find the time to set it up.
- P800 / Sidekick Comparison. Two cool phones, one being run into the ground by T-Mobile’s ineptitude, the other, not quite as spiffy, but sold by carriers with at least a little clue. I’m going to think about this pretty hard when it comes time to renew my T-Mobile contract.
- Digital Photography Review has a Nikon D2H Preview. Here’s another camera that inspires hardware lust in me. At $3500, I think I’ll probably be able to resist the temptation, but this is the kind of digital camera I really want. It’s got the equivalent of ISO 1600 sensitivity, and you can push that a couple extra stops if you don’t mind added sensor noise (there’s fairly strong evidence I don’t — I shot Tri-X at 6400 during high-school when I had access to the school’s lab so I could push-process my own film using some swell developer that worked slow but kept the grain and contrast from getting completely out of hand). The D2H can shoot 8 frames a second for up to five seconds before you have to wait for things to spool to the CF card. Shutter-lag is down to 37msec, which is pretty darned good. There’s manual mode so I can decide how to take the picture if I want, or full-auto, so I can let the camera think for me. And there are a handful of other features that sound tempting. Now if the smart guys at Nikon can just take the new sensor technology they’ve come up with and jam a 2-4 megapixel sensor into a compact enough camera that I can stuff into a pocket, and sell it for under a grand, I’ll be sold in a heartbeat. [gizmodo]
- Yes, we’ll have no bananas. Within about a year, the tasty yellow fruit will be extinct. Ten-thousand years of selective breeding have left the current bananas sterile. Since they’re all cloned, there’s not much genetic diversity and disease and pests are wiping ’em out. That’ll just leave the non-tasty varieties of bananas around. [boing boing]
- Hear about the plant that’s Stronger than LSD and legal? Well, if you take enough, you can’t remember what you did while taking it, so I’m thinking that’s probably a reason to avoid it. But the DEA’s still trying to get it made illegal.
- Rules eased on deer permits because there’s too darned many of ’em running around the state. Rather than entering a lottery for antlerless permits, hunters in most of the state can just buy ’em right in the store.
- Continental Divide Despite Some Promising Signs. Europe doesn’t really get baseball, and both the German and Greek teams have plenty of US-born and trained players, but there’s a chance it’ll catch on there. All I know is that Cory Harris is playing for the Greek team right now, and it feels like the Saints are missing his bat.
- Study Suggests NASA Should Consider Navy’s Safety Techniques for nuclear vessels. When the USN finds a problem, a fix has to be found and made before they can move on. NASA, on the other hand, identified the problem with foam falling from the shuttle’s external tank years ago, but still hadn’t done anything about it. But fixing the problem with NASA is tougher than it looks because at the head of NASA is a political appointee, who generally changes every time we get a new president. At the head of the Navy’s reactor program is an admiral who keeps the post for either years, regardless of political changes.
- I took a female friend shooting yesterday at the Burnsville Pistol Range. We shot a Smith & Wesson Model 41 which seemed like a pretty good choice. The grip was maybe a little big for her hand, the guy next to us with a .357 was making loud noises that startled her initially, and after we shot through a few hundred rounds, her arms got tired, but overall, a good time was had. She did great, shooting better than me on a few of the targets, and this was her first time ever firing a handgun. Total cost for the outing? $15 for range fees and targets, and under $5 for ammo. I really like how cheap it is to fire a .22LR. And I bet next time we go, she’ll have talked one of her friends into joining us.
- Kim du Toit is building a list of people who will volunteer to teach the basics of handgun shooting [update here]. I’m not sure whether I should add my name to Kim’s list or not, but if you’re a regular reader who’s interested in heading to the range… [endwar]
- I’ve had a few people ask my why I think gun ownership (and the associated being able to carry your guns around) is a good thing. Well, the US has between 83 and 96 guns for every hundred people (we’re not quite there to one-per-person), and it has the highest standard of living in the world. I wonder if maybe they’re related.
Especially when you have to try to explain why it is that the most heavily armed nation in the world is also the richest, most powerful and the one where “human development” is greatest and civil liberties of the citizens are least in peril.
- Speaking of guns, Challenges to state’s handgun law spreading, as more cities and the University of MN ban guns in their buildings. Churches are trying to get the posting requirements changed, too.
- Finally, in some site-news, I’ve actually set a font in the CSS for the site. After much noodling around, I decided I like Gill Sans enough to use it for the default font here. It’ll fall back to Trebuchet MS or whatever sans-serif font you want if you don’t have that. I think I like the look better, and Gill Sans is one of the fonts built into Mac OS X, so some of my readers will already have it.
- Here’s A Discussion of the Pinpoint vs. Amazon Case that goes into some detail about how prior art works, at least in this particular case. It’s illuminating.
- Check out these business lessons from the donut and coffee guy. Cool way to think about running a business. Maybe more businesses should think this way, rather than spending all their time patenting “business methods”.
- John Gilmore was ejected from a plane for wearing a button saying
suspected terrorist
. - The Quisling Effect explains how little compromises in our daily lives help erode freedom. Gilmore’s standing up against the effect. [endwar]
- Ross in Range is a weekly column by the author of Unintended Consequences ISBN:1888118040. He’s basically writing about whatever interests him for fun here, and I think some of it’s worth reading. An example is Abortion, Mole Removal, Helmet Laws, and Waiting Periods, or Doesn’t Anyone Have Principles Anymore? which asks why pro-choice groups who say
keep your laws off my body
aren’t in league with groups who oppose motorcycle helmet laws, groups who want to end drug prohibition, and groups who support a woman’s right to engage in prostitution. Uncomfortable silence ensues. [endwar] - CNdb used to be useful. You’d have a hankerin’ to see Alyssa Milano nekkid, do a little searching, and discover yourself renting Embrace of the Vampire (the unrated version) while receiving a knowing smirk from the clerk, who knew you either had a specialized yen, or had been scared out of the adult section again by the woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jane Wyatt from the Father Knows Best days again. But now, CNdb is so cluttered up with people rating G-rated movies with comments like
you can see the shadow of a nipple if you freeze-frame at 23:37.69 and turn up the contrast on your TV
and giving that shadow of a nipple three stars that it’s nearly useless. Hell in a handbasket, I tell ya. - Flutterby! now has real syndication using a protocol that was developed years ago for delivering large quantities of news. Excellent. [flutterby]
- Finding Avie talks about some of the user-hostile decisions Avie Tevanian has made over the years while being the VP of software at Apple. Bertrand Serlet, who’s taken his position (though I’m still not sure how the actual chain of command has changed) is another NeXTie who has proven to be fairly Mac-hostile as well. On the other hand, reports about Panther seem good so far, so I guess we’ll wait and see.
- Says here PDF is Unfit for Human Consumption. I mostly agree, but PDF does have a place, and that place is replacing EPS.
- Are you a ‘Bright’? What is it about the Brights that is causing such fits? To identify oneself as a ‘Bright’ simply means that one subscribes to a naturalistic worldview—i.e., absent belief in the supernatural. It appears to be an attempt to tie together disparate groups that include agnostics, skeptics, materialists, atheists, rationalists, naturalists and other science-minded people under a new term. It’s not without controversy, however, as some charge that it is elitist to co-opt a positive word as homosexuals did with ‘gay’. There are some fascinating reactions. [reed]
- I could use A Miracle In The Temple around here. My toilet’s been less-than-fully-functional for about four years, and one of these days I’ll probably end up completely breaking it just so I can get a replacement. [izzlepfaff!]
- Last night’s game: Saints Bang Way Past Gary, 9-3. A good game, close early, and then not close at all when the Saints chased the Railcats’ starter. Plus I got to take three gals to the ballgame. Woo! And now, two weeks off, unless I decide to climb into the car and drive to Winnipeg to see the Saints play up there this weekend. I’ve been threatening that all week, but here it is Friday morning and I still haven’t decided for sure. I think that means I’ll probably be staying home, since I’d need to leave in the next hour or so if I were going, and I think I probably need to rest more than I need more baseball.
- Picking Up the Pieces of shredded documents runs between $2000 and $10000 per cubic-foot of shreds. That’s about 100 pages or so, and companies are continually coming up with better tools for reconstructing the original documents.
- House proposal targets file swappers, making shaing even a single file a felony with a sentence of up to five years in prison and a quarter-million-dollar fine. More here from Wired. Bad idea. Bad. No surprise that Conyers (D-MI) and Berman (D-Disney) are behind it.
- Always wanted to go to Burning Man, but couldn’t get the logistics together? Well, Travelocity.com : Vacations : Burning Man 2003 is just the ticket. They’ll take care of your food and water, give you a
professional guide
and get you front row seats at the burning of the man. [update: it's a hoax] [flutterby] - Minoso Extends Record But Saints Lose, 6-5. Minnie got to bat first, and the count went 3-0 before the umpire called a strike (leading to yells of
Welcome to the Northern League, where balls are strikes and strikes are balls!
), then took a swing at the 3-1 pitch, filling the count, before being walked. That was it for Minnie. Then the Saints gave up 4, then rallied to tie, chasing the Railcats starting pitcher (who got tossed after making a comment to the umpire, and then the Railcats manager, who argued about the pitcher he was going to pull being tossed–weird). Gary got a couple off Chris Chavez in the top of the 9th, and that was just too much for the Saints. But it was a swell night even though the good guys lost.
In the parking lot post-game, we got to see (for the first time I can remember) a pedestrian get hit by a car. A kid was running across the lot, and got hit. The kid was okay, but there was a 4 inch dent in the car. Much standing around and talking until a few of us went to get a cop to sort it out. Then it was time to call it a night. Just too much excitement. - Make it seven decades: Minoso suits up again is ESPN’s story on the game.
- A Saints and Gophers Ballpark idea covers two bases, but I don’t think the Lexington and University site they’ve been talking about would make anybody happy. From the sound of it, any agreement is still a long way off, but I’m one of a number of people who would prefer to Save Midway Stadium.
- The 2003 Minneapolis Aquatennial begins tomorrow. Lots of things to do, and their website seems to need flash and want to play splashing sounds at you.
- Publish books for Free with Cafe Press. Hopefully this one will work out better than the other on-demand publishing ventures have. [boing boing]
-
Recently, the Saints have been bringing Seigo Masabuchi out for the Home Plate Clean-Up again. It’s really kind of a pointless thing, and I don’t think there’s even a sponsor for it this year (if there is, it isn’t a very good deal for ’em, since I can’t remember who it is), but Seigo seems to have fun sweeping off the plate while wearing one of the leftover sumo-wrestling suits and then dancing around with the broom to that Da, Da, Da song by Trio. Plus, it seems to be one of the fan-favorite bits of ushertainment, with people yelling for Seigo to “Ride The Pony”.
Seigo Rides the Pony 1039x782(182k) 640x481(41k) -
Pitchers shine as saints make it four in a row with their second win of the evening. It was a beautiful night for baseball, and the second game was a good one. The Saints took a one-run lead in the second, and that was it for scoring in the game. No earned runs for any of the pitchers. There were enough baserunners to keep it interesting, but it was mostly a pitching duel. Plus the Saints had someone cancel on their catering, so they gave a thousand pieces of cheesecake (not a coupon, but four big boxes) to one lucky fan (who shared - it was tasty cheesecake).
Second Game Soon 536x640(45k) - On the other hand, baseball in Minneapolis is having some problems: If It Looks Dead and It Smells Dead, Is It Still Alive? The Twins aren’t showing the promise that we all thought they had over the off-season, and seem to be in an extended funk. If they were in any division but the AL Central, there would be a lot to worry about.
- Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues talks about browsers. On the Mac, things are pretty clear, and Safari’s a good browser. On Windows, the waters are a lot murkier, and it remains to be seen what’s going to take the place of IE6.
- It’s official: AOL kills Netscape. No word on what’s going to happen to the Mozilla project yet, but they’ve laid off everyone who worked for Netscape. I’m not sure whether that simplifies or complicates the coming browser shake-out. [some guy]
- Well, I wasn’t sure how last night's game came out until this morning, and as it turns out, it was suspended. See, we’d gone out to the ballpark about 5pm, and gotten through the hassles to get the bobble-head and were ready to go into the game. But it started raining about 6:25. Then it stopped and the game was supposed to start at 7:30. Just as they pulled off the tarp, it started raining again, and at 8:40, they finally said
we’re trying for a 9:30 start
which is when I called it a night and headed home. I was in bed before they got started. I guess I’ll catch the rest of it tonight. - The Minnesota Historical Society has their Play Ball! exhibit running through October 26th. Warning, annoying sounds come out of the flash intro.
- This is A Conversation with Jim Gray that’s pretty interesting. He talks about how the growth of disk storage capacities have outpaced the ability to access that data, and what it means for computers. An interesting side-note, rather than network huge chunks of data, Gray FedExes complete computers with terabytes of storage around the country to people who need the data.
- Hackers, software companies feud over disclosure of weaknesses. Me, I’m for disclosure once you’ve notified the company with the security bug and given them a chance to respond. In this case, Microsoft didn’t, and disclosure was the right thing. Trustworthy computing or not, if they don’t fix the bugs in software that’s already on millions of machines, that should be disclosed.
- Funding for TIA All But Dead. Hey, that’s some good news! The government isn’t going to have the money to snoop (more) into all our lives.
- For Democrats Challenging Bush, Ashcroft Is Exhibit A. Finally people are starting to notice the trampling of the Bill of Rights. Of course, it’s the same people who passed USA-PATRIOT a couple years back, so they don’t really have a lot of credibility on the matter (which is what’s prompting them to blame Ashcroft), but it’s an encouraging sign nonetheless, mostly because they’re starting to get some heat for passing such a terrible law.
- A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy talks about the dynamics of groups and the problems involved. I’ve seen groups blow up a number of times. I think the problems pointed out are also probably the fundamental flaws that will keep anyone from forming a perfectly libertarian community. It's a long article and worth reading, but the conclusions are: 1 - you cannot separate technological and social issues; 2 - members are not users; and 3 - the core group (members) has rights that trump individual rights of users.
- Fighting for the Right to Communicate. Intel v. Hamidi has been settled, and the disgruntled ex-Intel employee won. It means that (at a minimum) Intel’s claim that he trespassed on their computer systems by sending email to Intel employees has been shot down. Will this affect the laws governing spam? It also could be important to unions trying to organize workers at a company.
- A Web Site Causes Unease in Police, but the real issue it raises is what kind of expectation of privacy can any of us have anymore?
- Last night, Susan took me to see The Tim Malloys and the Young Dubliners. Fun was had. Then we headed to Punk Karaoke (where I actually did my first 2am bar-close). A ride back to her place with her roommate (we’d had a bit to drink), then a three mile walk home, and the evening was complete. Okay, I maybe could have planned the “getting home” part a little better, but I still had mucho fun. And slept until noon.
- Hey, today’s the second day of the Basilica Block Party. Don’t think I’ll be going. I seem to have used up a whole weekend’s worth of fun already.
- Parking meter changes begin Monday in Minneapolis, most notably, the police are going to begin enforcing the law against re-plugging your meter. In other words, when your meter expires, it’s time to move on, or you’ll get a ticket.
- For my Bay Area readers who are interested in baseball, Chris Begg moves to San Jose, and is playing with the Giants. He’s a reliever who converted to a starter, and the kid’s got some pretty decent stuff. Go check him out if you get the chance.
- Last night was the last Saints game of the half, and it ended badly. Blegh. Go read the description. I was too disgusted by the lack of hustle and offense by the Saints. It’s the first series the Saints have lost at home this year, and that comes after they’d clinched the first half, but it doesn’t give me warm-fuzzies for how they’re going to play the second half. I hope I’m wrong. Oh, and in spite of the “official attendance” figure of 6,177, I head that the actual gate was about 3,200. Thanks to the twenty-nine hundred people who didn’t show up to cheer on the team.
- Cringely asks if we’re Shooting Ourselves in the Foot with all the electronic surveillance systems. The only really encouraging thing about TIA is that half of all IT projects fail. And if you’re wondering why this is bad, just think about the systems that are already in place and how people use them (cops looking up the records for a friend who’s wondering about a new dating prospect, for example). Now imagine that sort of (already illegal) behavior scaled up with much more information, some of it accurate.
- The Antigravity Underground. Huh! Maybe I will get a flying car after all.
- Women May Ovulate More Than Once a Month, Study Says, which goes a long way towards explaining why another word for a proponent of the rhythm method is “mommy”. [flutterby]
- Says here the Shriners aren’t partying until the wee hours either. I still haven’t actually taken advantage of the 2am closing time for bars yet. But based on some email I got this morning, it looks like not everyone came straight home after the game. [strib]
- Go watch the Sue All The World Music Video (from the Napster Bad! Cartoon Series on Camp Chaos). Warning, explicit lyrics, not safe for work, might split sides from laughing or spew soda on keyboard. Requires flash, and is worth it. [boing boing]
- In the Temperament Wars of politics, the Dems are portrayed as nice guys, and the Reps as ideologues who will use any means to achieve the ends they desire. I don’t know if it’s as black and white as that, since there are politicians of both stripes who seem willing to use their power to strip us of our rights and make government more intrusive, but I would say that the Democrats tend to have an easier go of seeming like “nice guys”.
- Dutch mass spammer loses grip, goes down in flames. Cool. [fark!]
- Iran students cancel protest to mark 1999 unrest, so there won’t be a bunch of news of a slaughter in Iran today.
- Is it true that Opposites Attract? Not in Real Life, it appears. Guess I need to find me a nice geek girl who digs baseball, beer & bourbon.
- Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com as more people are having good luck finding that special someone via an online service. Maybe I’ll have to look online.
- Spray-on stockings enthral Japan. Yep. Spray-on silk stockings. Huh! [davezilla]
- Huh. Here’s a thing telling you how to draw diagonal shapes with CSS. So that’s the trick! And here’s more Information on Border Slants for making diagonal lines and shapes.
- About the Title Pictures shows a cool use of overflow:hidden in CSS. Spiffy. [zeldman]
- Last time I was in London, I saw some of the Smart Coupes on display. Cute. But now there’s the smart roadster. Sadly, SmartCar of America says it’s going to be another year or two before any of them appear in the US. But if the roadster was available for €11,000 here in the US and I actually fit inside it, I’d probably snap one right up. I have a suspicion I’m too big for their cars, though. [gizmodo]
- Speaking of little cars, the Shriners are in town this week.
- Says here that on Mac OS X, you can crash screensaver locked with password and get the desktop back . Looking at the rest of the thread reveals that it takes between 1280 and 1380 characters. Sheesh. Last Monday evening I was talking with mpp and we were talking about buffer-overflow bugs that he was reporting on Crays in the early 1980s. When trying out some new software, one of the first things he would do is just hold down a key, letting it repeat and see if the the software crashed. Most of the time it would. Haven’t people learned anything in the intervening twenty years? Apparently not (although OpenBSD fixed all the buffer overflows a few releases back).
- Crunching the Market’s Numbers: Risk, Yes; Reward, Maybe. The big news is that stock markets follow a power-law distribution rather than a gaussian distribution. That makes a big difference in the kind of strategy you might want to use.
- Website turns tables on government officials, with Government Information Awareness. Dossiers of goverment officials, created with publicly available information, and supplemented by contributions by pretty much anyone who chooses to add information. Not all that different from Felon Poindexter’s system, really. Expect slow access times, but a growing amount of information. Very handy when you’re trying to figure out who to vote for, too. [endwar]
- In the Fight for Privacy, States Set Off Sparks as concerns over government invasion of privacy has moved from just those of us on the fringes into the mainstream.
- Gun law’s author hit right on target profiles Joe Olson, who teaches law at Hamline Law School and wrote the Minnesota Personal Protection Act. Sounds like a pretty darned good guy:
If you don’t have a gun, if you don’t have power—it doesn’t have to be guns, but it has to be real, personal power, individually and as citizens—if you don’t have that, then whatever you have is only there at the sufferance of government,
Olson said. - The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? Well, for some people, being offline for a few minutes is a major crisis. Sheesh. There’s a reason I like baseball. Taking a few hours to just watch a game develop is a fun chance to slow down. Or shutting off the computer long enough to actually listen to what someone’s presenting at a conference. Heresy! Cory doesn’t think it’s a problem for him, saying we’re not Emailing ourselves to death.
- Finally, this weekend, It was the first Saturday night with Minneapolis bars open until 2 and things were pretty much as normal, but an hour later. That’s about what I saw, too.
- Study: Wi-Fi users still don’t encrypt. Makes me relatively proud that I actually set up tunnels to check my email while at WWDC.
- Doc was having some problems using email from one of those closets they have in hotels where you can theoretically get high-speed internet access. My solution during MacHack and WWDC was that if I could connect to my server via ssh, I had “access” otherwise, the net was too flaky (or intentionally broken) to use for anything more than looking at web-pages. Why is ssh my benchmark for a reliable connection? Well, if I can maintain an ssh session, I can also maintain an ssh tunnel, which will let me send and read email securely.
Here’s the invocation (note that this may wrap in your browser, but you want just one line you’ll type into a shell):
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C -f -N -L 2500:betternerds.com:25 betternerds.com -L 1100:betternerds.com:110 betternerds.com
And then I configure my email client to talk to localhost:2500 for sending (SMTP) and localhost:1100 for receiving (POP3) and I’m golden. If you’re talking to a server other than mine (betternerds.com), you’ll want to change the server name in the commands. Also, you might have different POP3 and SMTP servers.
Of course this assumes you’re not afraid of a command-line and have already got an ssh key that’ll work. Also, when you’re done, you want to:
killall -HUP ssh
to shut down all ssh connections (you might want to use ps and kill to shut them down if you’re doing other things with ssh). Three things to worry about on the command-line, but suddenly you’re working with secure email and you don’t have to worry about someone reading confidential email or sniffing your password while you’re working on an insecure network.
I’ve tried this on both OpenBSD and Mac OS X machines. I suspect it will work on all BSDs, and might well work on Linux, but I don’t have a Linux machine around to test it on. -
At last night’s Saints game I was the first guy to say no (and make it stick, there was a Canadian that Eric talked into taking it) to Pandora’s Box. The thing I could have won was 100 scratch-off tickets for the Minnesota Lottery, and I actually found that pretty easy to refuse. I don’t especially like the stupidity tax, and in the time I had to think about it, I figured that saying no was worth more than the expected return of about $70. As it turns out, one woman gave me a dollar for my
Me & Susan 1423x950(219k) 640x427(27k) integrity
and about thirty strangers commented to me one way or another (most wondering if I was insane), but what the heck. I got a laugh, and I got Eric to call me apacifist hippie
in front of sixty-two hundred people (once he’d recovered his composure enough to be able to talk). I may be out some money, but I got a laugh. I guess that makes me a humor slut of some sort, right?
fireworks 948x743(131k) 640x501(26k) -
I tried to take some pictures of the fireworks, but the sky was still pretty light (though not as light as it appears in these pictures) and of the thirty pictures, I was only really happy with these. Oh well.
fireworks 1766x797(124k) 640x288(9k) -
I didn’t notice until yesterday that Minneapolis grocer George Delmonico died at 81 while I was out of town. Dangit. I feel bad for the family, and I’m going to miss George. [steph]
fireworks 906x729(101k) 640x514(21k) - Tonight is the Saint Paul Saints Independence Day fireworks. Should be a good show, and I wouldn’t be surprised if tickets are still available.
- Minneapolis’ last gun shop moves — with sidearms sidelined. In fact it won’t be a gun shop at all, but rather a gun-accessories shop, which also offers training, but Mark Koscielski will reopen on Friday, despite all the attempts to chase him out of Minneapolis. [strib]
- Citywide 2 a.m. last call OK’d in St. Paul. It’ll begin August 1.
- A cool wind blows through Userland Hell — the XML-RPC spec clarified XML-RPC, one of the original ‘webservice’ transport specifications is beautiful in its simplicity and has seen wide adoption as a result. However, it has nevertheless been mired in confusion for years, which has discouraged its use over more verbose mechanisms like SOAP. The cause? A reference to ‘ASCII’ encoding for strings—not good for those looking to encode international characters in XML. The spec’s author, Dave Winer, has relented and unfrozen the spec to make a key clarification, possibly in response to this or the effort to launch a new weblog syndication format that is not controlled by Winer, called Echo. In any case, the future is smiling upon XML-RPC. This bodes well for one of Reed’s projects. [reed]
- Man Turns Tables on Telemarketer. Minnesota Auto Glass was calling the guy up to three times a day. So he started calling back, and it actually worked. [fark!]
- Even when not on a phone, cell phone users are more distracted when driving. See, it turns out the people who can’t talk on a cellphone and drive at the same time are just shitty drivers whether they’re on the phone or not.
- There’s a thread on Digital Photography Review giving tips for taking pictures of fireworks. Timely. [holy schmoly]
- PrintDreams has what it calls the World’s Smallest and Most Flexible Mobile Printer. Awfully cool. I think I want one. [boing boing]
- Bloggers Gain Libel Protection. Hmm. Not sure whether this is a good thing or not. More thinking required. [boing boing]
- Going Long In Blood Moss talks about online economies and how they relate to the real world. It’s a fascinating bit of economics. Or sociology. Or something. [101-280]
- Open source prepares to kiss EU patent ass goodbye as the EU prepares to allow patents on software and business methods. [scripting]
- Rybak to bar patrons: Be funky and smart with the new 2am bar closing times that went into effect last night. And here’s a handy online list of 2AM bars in Minnesota. Dub’s wasn’t open late last night, but they could have been. They’ve decided that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are “bartender’s choice” nights, and they’ll close at either 1 or 2, depending on how the bartender feels, and how many customers are around.
- Developer Notes from WWDC 2003 [Jun. 24, 2003] rounds up some of the headlines from last Monday’s keynote.
- Want to Do More with an iSight than Chat? Try EvoCam.
- Air Link’s Premiere Gets Rave Reviews / Locals, visitors gush about new transit option. The
Geek Train
BART ran from SFO to downtown for the first time on Sunday, just as a number of us were coming from MacHack to WWDC. The picture on the right is of Marshall, a well-known Mac Geek. I found the train a very good thing for getting into and out of town. - TSA Under Pressure To Stop Baggage Theft. Seems to me the obvious solution is to not check bags. I managed a 12-day three-airport trip without ever checking a bag. Had to send clothes out for cleaning a couple times, but that’s better than having my stuff ripped off, I think. [boing boing]
- Stop clapping, this is serious.
Tom Lehrer is still feisty and funny, but the king of sophisticated satire tells Tony Davis there’s no place for his style of humour now: the world just wouldn’t get it.
Yes, Tom Lehrer’s still alive, and no, he’s not planning to go on tour anytime soon:Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
He’s pretty disappointed by audiences today, and is convinced his kind of humor wouldn’t find an audience, even if he did crave the spotlight (which he doesn’t). I’m pretty sure I’d enjoy a show if there was one to go to, though. And for whatever reason, I feel like I could use a laugh or two now. [jr] - Last Month
Why is it that at the end of the month I always have that well, there’s another good month shot to hell
feeling? It’s not that I’m not getting stuff done (well, most months), but the stuff I’m getting done isn’t necessarily what I’d hoped. I’d call it a midlife crisis, but I don’t think buying a Corvette and getting a 21-year old girlfriend would solve it. Then again…
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but with the Saints on the road, I’ve had more evenings free lately, and have been spending them watching movies. Here are some quick reviews. Opinions expressed are all mine.
Oops. Bad update for the day on the first try. Let’s try this again…
…in which I don the “cranky old man” hat for the day
Took a long walk yesterday. It didn’t set out to be a long walk, but I started walking, and didn’t turn around to head home until farther than I should have. I got home and my feet were tired, my head was sun-cooked (but apparently not burned), and I was ready for a fine nap. Between that and reading two books (The Conquistador ISBN:0451459083, and Call of the Wild ISBN:0812504321) over the weekend, I think I had a pretty relaxing time. And I think I needed it.
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| Stairs from Coffman |
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As part of my walk, I checked out the new plaza behind Coffman Union that leads down to the River Flats. There’s an open area, then a wall, and then (if you venture far enough from Coffman to see past the wall) these stairs that lead downhill. When they described this to our neighborhood (before the construction started), there was talk about the grand sweeping vistas and how it’d be a clear view down to the river. Well, if you’re going to do that, don’t put a fargin’ wall on the top of the hill to hide the view. Grumble.
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| The End |
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Then when you get to the bottom of the hill and cross East River Road, the broad sweeping path that’s supposed to lead you into the park Just Ends. Did I mention that I have some issues with how this has been done so far? Oh, and there were also people walking their bikes down the stairs from Coffman yesterday because they couldn’t find the bike-path that connects the Washington Avenue Bridge to the River Flats Park. Maybe some signage would help? Or maybe actually having a path that makes that connection would help.
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| Downtown over the River Flats |
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But at least you’re in River Flats Park and have a beautiful view of downtown, and a bit of shelter from the noise of the city. It’s a place I usually ride to, but walking lends a different pace to the outing, as well as making it easier to see some things I usually don’t. A slightly different composition from last year makes for a lot different picture (I’ve been using last year’s picture as my desktop background recently, and thought it might be time for a replacement).
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| Downtown from the Walkway |
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Farther down the river is the walkway. I noticed for the first time that from the shade under the I-94 bridge, there’s a pretty darned good view of downtown. When I’m riding my trike through here, the railings are high enough that I don’t really notice the view until I’m off the walkway. It’s almost exactly the same spot where I took a picture three years ago, but a different composition. I’m pretty sure I like this one better.
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After climbing up out of the gorge, it was time to head home. I walked most of the way along East River Road, where the city is building a new bike-path. It should be pretty spiffy when it’s done, but for now, the construction is kind of a mess. This picture was looking back behind me as I headed home, and misses showing the big piles of crushed limestone in the sections where they’re less done with construction. I think it’s a great project (it’ll be nice to have continuous bike-paths along the river beginning at the Plymouth Bridge on the west, and the U of M on the east), but I sure wish they were done with it.
And yes, I know the tone of this was a bit grumbly. That’s kind of how the weekend went, but here it is Monday, and I’m feeling a lot better for it.
Not much of an update today. I’m grumpy and late and my asshole neighbors were shooting off fireworks until 1am when (hopefully) the cops shut them down or (more likely) they ran out of fireworks.
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| Bill and the Band |
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Went to the Saints game last night with Bill, Brian and Mike. Geeks night out or something. There was a band in the parking lot before the game who serenaded us. As for rain, there were a few sprinkles pre-game, and some actual rain during the game, but never enough to stop play. Ended up being a bit chilly by the time we were done though.
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| Brats on Edge |
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Dinner was simple fare: bratwursts and burgers. Seemed to work for everyone, and meant that I didn’t have to think too hard about cooking. I even had time to take a picture of the brats cooking when I managed to stand all five brats (why do they come in packages of five when buns come in eights?) on edge to cook that side of them.
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| Mr. Impossible |
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I’m still having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after the MacHack/WWDC trip. I’m not sure exactly why it is, but I think it’s a cumulative effect. The client I’m working for is running behind on shipping software (that’s not much of a surprise in this business), which means that I’m fully employed for the summer. Sounds great, right? Well, I try to plan summers for lighter work so I can take in more Saints games. There’s the travel thing. Two conferences back-to-back is brutal. I find myself sometimes stopping and thinking and basically figuring out something I heard two weeks ago and am just now getting time to ponder. I’m not very happy with where I’m living - this house sucks in the summer, as the south wall gets no shade, and is dark, and ventilation wasn’t a consideration when the house got chopped up to be a 4-plex, so even though the overnight temp last night was in the 60s, I’m still running the A/C to keep it comfortable in here. I’ve started looking for a new house, but the mortgage banker I was going to work with is changing companies, so I’ve been asked to wait a few weeks. I could probably go on even longer, but it’s time to get some breakfast in me and then get to work. Oh well, here’s a few links…
Well, the holiday weekend is done and gone. It was a pretty good weekend, I guess. A ball game on Thursday, staying home and watching a movie Friday night, poker on Saturday, and out for a few beers last night. About the only thing I got accomplished was cleaning the kitchen enough that we could play poker, and I woke up feeling tired this morning (I think I need a break from the warm weather, but it looks like that’s coming tonight). Oh well, a bit of a late start today, but it’s back to the work-week. Wish me luck.
…or sending email without worrying about packet sniffers
Updated on 3. October, 2003 — Chaz pointed me to SSH Tunnel Manager which provides a spiffy graphical interface to the whole thing. Much easier than using these commands if you’re running on Mac OS X. If you’re running on some other BSD, this will probably still be useful.
Updated on 19. July, 2003 — you can create multiple tunnels with a single command, and I’ve changed the command listed below to reflect that.
Yesterday was the annual Fourth of July Parade in my neighborhood. It’s not a huge affair, and I haven’t even made it to the parade most years, but I needed a walk yesterday afternoon, and it was a good destination. I got to visit with a few folks while waiting for the parade, take a few pictures, and was done with that in about a half-hour. There was also the Festival in front of St. Anthony Main, which was basically a bunch of booths with people selling things. The parade went right through that, too. It all wrapped up on Nicollet Island, where there was a lonely jazz trio playing for the benefit of a handful of bums, and one family. I hope some of the parade participants at least stopped by, as these guys looked pretty lonely, but kept playing in the hot sun.
I didn’t go out in the evening to watch the fireworks just a few blocks from my house. I thought about it, but was in the middle of watching Bound For Glory, which I figured was a lot more patriotic than staring at some fire in the sky.
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| MPD leads the parade |
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The parade started with a contingent from the Minneapolis Police Department. The horse-patrol led, followed by a police car whooping and chirping its siren.
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| Firemen |
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A fire truck followed, also occassionally whooping its siren.
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| Don Samuels |
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Next was a band, with Third Ward councilman Don Samuels riding along and getting his face in front of the people who will be in his ward next election cycle.
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| St. Anthony West Neighborhood |
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The St. Anthony West Neighborhood had pretty good turnout.
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These kids were pretty enthusiastic about removing grafitti. They were even chanting about it.
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I’m not sure which group he was with, but this guy had a nice motorcycle with some decorations.
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There was a contingent promoting the new Mill Ruins Park (just across the river).
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| Minneapolis Millers |
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And some people in Minneapolis Millers uniforms handing out candy to the kids.
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| Marcy Holmes Neighborhood Association |
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Next up were the representatives from my neighborhood. If I’d been a little less hung-over, I might have joined them on my trike, but as it was, I was hurrying to get down to the river in time to watch the parade.
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The Southeast Angle had a pretty good turnout. I think everyone who works at or writes for the paper was there.
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I’m not sure whether this hummer was National Guard, Army, or what. But they had candy for the kids!
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Bringing up the tail was a trolley car. The first one was actually part of the parade. The second one was just on the normal tour, and got caught behind the parade.
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| Jazz Trio |
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Finally, the lonely jazz trio set up on Nicollet Island.
For what it’s worth, I’m getting closer to being back on a normal schedule. I’d say I’ve made it to MDT. And attending last night’s game with Steph put me in a better mood, too.
I know this probably won’t get much sympathy from folks, but I’m still trying to get back on track after being out of town. I’m still waking up on PDT, rather than CDT like I ought (normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but it makes for short working days when I head off to a Saints game at 5pm), and the backlog of things to do around the house feels oppressive enough that I don’t seem to be making any headway. There’s work piling up for existing clients and new clients to be landed.
To top it off, yesterday when I got my mail, there was a postcard from San Francisco, I think from the desk-clerk at the Powell Hotel. It said simply:
David -
Come back soon.
San Francisco is
less without you!
followed by an unreadable signature. This probably isn’t the manly thing to admit, but when I read that yesterday, I first nearly teared-up, and then spent the rest of the afternoon moping that I hadn’t had enough time for fun on the trip, even though by the end of it, I just wanted to be home.
Well, enough of that. It’s time to start making some money to pay the bills and to also get the laundry and dishes dealt with so maybe I can get back to what passes for normal life around here by next week. Wish me luck.
This morning I overslept and decided not to drive to the suburbs for the weekly meeting my client has on Tuesdays. I think it was a good choice, but when I went to cook up some breakfast, I opened the dishwasher (which I’d run before leaving town) only to discover that I probably should have actually emptied it before leaving. There was enough moisture left in there that the once-clean dishes had taken on some sort of funk. Bleagh! So now I’m running the dishwasher again.
Yesterday was spent sorting through the three inches of paper mail (three checks, six bills and three magazines worth keeping from the whole pile), and reading through the 800-odd emails that had come in while I was away (most of which I’d looked at while on the road). Today, I’m going to try and plow through the 50 of those emails that were worthy of keeping around, and try to balance all the books and pay the bills that had arrived, and I think once that’s done, I’ll finally be almost back to normal. I really need to remember to schedule a couple days off when I get back from any extended trip for just this sort of catching up.
Continuing with the catching up theme, here are some links I probably should have gotten to earlier, but you’re going to get them today.